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Notes -
Arnold Kling on Michael Huemer on Thought Crime
It kind of goes without saying, but inherent in the notion of "thought crime" are both crime and punishment. If it doesn't deserve punishment, then it's not a crime.
Amen, brother. But is this just preaching to the choir? Consider: A whole lot of NPCs and talking heads sure ate up The Narrative. Propaganda is effective, to an extent, but beyond that extent it is deeply corrosive, particularly to any intellectual class, who become disillusioned and cynical. Thought crime is next.
Religions in general, and Christianity in particular, are all about thought crime. You have to take the salvation of Jesus into your heart or something, and if you don't, have fun with eternal damnation. I can accept Aquinas, Chesterton, C.S. Lewis. These are men who appealed to reason, writing to convince and persuade.
I imagine only atheists see the appeal of comparing woke (progressive, successor) ideology to a religion of sorts, likely filling some kind of primitive need for tribal loyalty, purity tests, and expensive signals (rabid adherence to nonsense). I'd love to hear Antonin Scalia's take though. Or L. Ron Hubbard's. Perhaps what we are seeing with successor ideology is not an individual need for such, but instead just the character of mass movements, the nature of power, its patterns of growth and movement and perpetuation. Are propaganda and thought crime inevitable?
Let's take it back to 1984. Orwell demonstrates the existential horror of a regime that can successfully deploy thought crime. Didn't he make it blindingly obvious for everyone? I'm pretty sure we were all nodding our heads in 8th grade English class about the evils of totalitarianism, only a few years after the USSR fell. I suspect this issue is particularly salient for me, as a libertarian.
Anyways, I'm not mad, just disappointed.
I think you go to far to say religious can’t see woke as a proto-religion. The woke can’t because they don’t want to be labeled a religion. In fact I think woke is specifically a Christian religion. Jesus made the slave the equal to the emperor and ate with prostitutes etc. Woke is just the same thing of picking the people they think are the lowest in society and putting them on top. Where it differs is Christianity made the slave equal to the emperor whereas woke seems to want to put George Floyd above the POTUS and the black transvestite above George Floyd. A reverse pyramid instead of equality.
On thought crime I think Kling hits on some truth that thought crime only matters when it leads to elite insecurity. I think of Marxism and communism where I don’t have any big issue restricting their speech but that only comes into play when I see a threat they will win. Knowing the end game of Marxism makes me not have a problem with punishing their thought crime.
The older I get the more I realize libertarianism is a second order belief after you have a good culture. Humans are social creatures. Nobody would want to live in a world where 90% of society becomes fentanyl zombies. You’d rather just ban fentanyl.
Wokism is literally just Calvinism minus the concept of divine grace.
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